27 February 2010

The other night, I left my headlights on. A defect of my car -- probably the alternator -- means that if the lights are on for longer than an hour, the battery dies.

So after pounding my steering wheel in the parking lot for a few minutes and fiddling with my cellphone, I connected with a guy with a truck who'd give me a jump start.

Twenty minutes later, he pulled up in a shiny white pickup and zapped the battery with some juice.

The guy had olive skin, a wispy goatee, long black curly hair, and, in contrast to his truck, dressed all in black with an over-sized Punisher t-shirt on -- the one with the white skull on black.

The car turned over. I paid him and threw in a tip. Sheer gratitude. When you don't have wheels, you realize just how lost you are, just how open to the indifferent elements, and how far away home can be. So I was feeling generous.

"So," he said, the job over, the cash in his pocket. "How are the ladies in there?" He nodded to the bar.

"Fine." I had to think, so I amended my answer. "Average."

"Well, my girlfriend's ugly. She's ugly on the outside." I expected him to follow up with the cliche, but he veered off.: 'And she's ugly on the inside. And she gets uglier every day." He spat it out like a rotten orange.

"Kind of like being married.

"I ask myself why I stay with her. It's because she's got kids. Three of them."

Before I could say anything to that, he tossed his hair, thanked me again and said he had to go.

And I wondered, later, who was punishing whom back in his house with the three kids and the woman who just kept getting uglier..

25 February 2010

To my shame, there are entire days when I sound exactly like this. I especially despise the rising intonation in the middle of sentences? Like embedded questions? Which practically screams, "Don't take me seriously."

By contrast, and despite Russell Brand's many annoying tics, he's a pleasure to listen to because he's articulate. And that silver-tongued fellow, oh my brothers, is Katy Perry's boyfriend. Check him out in action with Dawn French, one of the creators of Absolutely Fabulous.

22 February 2010

In celebration, we'll toast the great director with a martini, made according to his own technique:

Bunuel was fond of cocktails, and devoted a chapter of his autobiography to alchohol.
He invented a cocktail of his own, the Bunueloni -- essentially, a variation on the negroni:
1 oz. gin
1 oz. sweet Cinzano, and
1 oz. Carpano (a variety of red vermouth)

17 February 2010

No one we know of has ever exacted a more total retribution for a wrong done to him than Hermotimus. He was taken prisoner in a war, put for sale, and bought by a man from Chios called Panionius. Now, Panionius made a living in the most atrocious way imaginable. What he used to do was acquire good-looking boys, castrate them, and take them to Sardis and Epheseus, where he would offer them for sale at very high prices; in foreign countries eunuchs command higher prices than whole men on account of their complete reliability. One of Panionius' victims -- one among a great many, because this was they way he made a living -- was Hermotimus. In fact, however, Hermotimus' luck was not all bad: he was sent from Sardis to Xerxes' court as one of a number of gifts, and eventually became the king's most valued eunuch.

Now, when Xerxes was in Sardis, in the course of setting out with his army against Athens, Hermotimus went down on some business or other to the part of Mysia called Atarneus, where people from Chios live, and he met Panionius there. He entered into a long, friendly conversation with him, first listing all the benefits that had come his way thanks to Panionius, and then offering to do as much good to him in return; all he had to do, he said, was move his family to Atarneus and live there. Panionius gladly accepted Hermotimus' offer and moved his wife and children there.

So when Hermotimus had Panionius and his whole family where he wanted, he said, "Panionius, there is no one the the world who makes a living in as foul a way as you do. What harm did I or any of my family do to you or any of yours? Why did you make me a nothing instead of a man? You expected the gods not to notice what you used to do in those days, but the law they follow is one of justice, and for your crimes they have delivered you into my hands. As a result, then, you should have no grounds for complaint about the payment I am going to extract from you."

When he had finished this rebuke, he had Panionius's sons brought into the room and proceeded to force him to castrate all four of them. The deed was done, under compulsion, and afterwards Hermotimus forced the sons to castrate their father. And that is how vengeance and Hermotimus caught up with Panionius.

16 February 2010

An old man in France told me this one evening over a goblet of calvados. "During the occupation of France, there was a reasonably successful farmer near a small village in Normandy. This farmer did his best to ignore the Germans, had a wife adn two teenaged daughters and a son away at war. The farmer raised pigs and fed them primarily on beets and beet greens. Scarcely anyone knew that he and his family provided a safe house for members of the Resistance and for Jews trying to esape from the country. There was a envious couple in town and, as an aside, the husband had been thrashed by the farmer for trying to molest one of his daughters when she was a child. The couple, Vichy types, caught wind of the farmers Resistance activities and reported them to the Germans. The Germans raided the farm and found two Jewish children, whom they summarily bayonted. The farmer and his wife were forced to watch while their pigs were killed, their daughters raped and strangled. The Germans then held a barbecue.

"When the son returned from the war, he heard the story but was wise enough to delay his revenge, allowing the couple to think they had gotten away with their betrayal. In 1947, the son and two of his friends bound and kidnapped the couple. They took them to an abandoned quarry where a large cave had been partially filled with a ton or so of beets and a dozen pigs. The son and his friends returned in a few weeks with a dozen villagers. They all toasted the well-gnawed bones of the couple and had a fine pig roast there in the quarry. I cherish the moment the pigs finished the beets and began chewing on those swine. May they be eaten in hell forever."

15 February 2010

Survey says Boulder happiest place in U.S.

A new, massive study of Americans' attitudes has found that Boulder is home to the happiest, healthiest people in the nation. A Gallup-Healthways Well-Being index — which analyzed interviews with more than 353,000 Americans last year — asked people to assess their jobs, finances, health, emotional state of mind and communities.
Boulder ranked No. 1 overall, No. 1 in work experience, No. 4 in healthy behaviors, No. 7 in physical health, No. 10 in access to basic things needed for a healthy life, and No. 27 in emotional health.

13 February 2010

12 February 2010

Do they think they are being original when they say
This is a new thing for me to ask, and ask,
Do you love me?
Everyone these days keeps asking,
Do you love me?
Everyone says
This is a new thing for me to ask.

Th answer is yes I don't.
Do you love me?
The answer is yes.
The eyes glisten with feeling.
The creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it.
The sudden pecking of asking, of being asked, is this.
The answer is yes I don't
The heart got the shot but got the flu anyway.
And the body aches, and fever and chills, and can't sleep.

The forest shivers with fever.
Their mother pulls their covers up.
The whippoorwill keeps calling whippoorwill whippoorwill.
Do you love me? Do you love me? I don't love you.
Not everyone is afraid.
Not everyone feels vulnerable.
Everyone is afraid of the terrible joy. I do.
Each other is Mecca.
The hajj to the Other.

When you travel with your cameras and have to check your luggage, pack a gun with the equipment. That way, it receives special treatment from the TSA. Your stuff is then less likely to be stolen or lost by the airlines.

08 February 2010

Passionate Couple Seeking Female Videographer (Denver)
from craigslist | creative gigs in denver / boulder
Hello everyone and thanks for checking out our ad. We are a passionate, attractive, loving couple, she is 28 and I am 32, who has recently reconnected after 9 years of falling out of touch. We have a very romantic story and deep feelings for each other that grow stronger each day. We are also both very sensual and sexual and have talked about expressing that in making a home video but have decided it would be even more of a beautiful memory of us making love if we could have someone else do all the work with the camera and lights. So it comes down to us seeking a professional minded female videographer with an eye for passion filming us in either the location of my apartment or possibly a room in the Hotel Teatro or the Brown Palace. Your roll is to film and work the lighting equipment set up. The camera and lighting will be very high end. We want as professionally a recorded video as possible. Nothing at all tacky or cheap. We will be making love and we want all of our emotion to be captured in that way as well as the uncensored heat between us. Again, nothing cheap or like lifeless staged porn. This video is for us and only us. You will not be keeping or editing anything but you will be paid well and in cash. We intend to have you film and nothing more as we want it to remain completely our own and very much appreciate your understanding. We are also very serious and fully intend on doing this using someone as the videographer who we have first met in person and then are comfortable with. Please, when responding, take this matter very seriously as will we, but also know we are both very very friendly and approachable. Really looking forward to hearing from you all and we'll respond with more details about where, when, and how we here we can meet in a safe public place to say hello and discuss details. Again, thank you.

I didn't make this up -- for one thing, I can spell better. For another, really, how could anyone make this up? It sounds like the beginning of a post-modern Hitchcock scenario, or maybe just another variation on the delivery man opener.

All I gotta say is, it's a good thing they're planning the first meeting in a safe public place -- about the only whiff of sense in the thing.

04 February 2010

A Frenchman once told me that it's impossible to have good or bad taste - you either have taste, or you don't.

I've decided not to have taste. This sounds like condemning yourself to being a kind of aesthetic water - clear, but colorless. Or that I'll suddenly develop a fondness for the gross, the vulgar and Judd Apatow movies.

Up until now, I have had excellent taste, if I may say so myself. I am, in fact, the very person the notion of taste was developed for - a more or less educated middle class person who cravenly wants to identify himself with an aristocracy.

Aristocrats, of course, don't have to worry about taste. They're aristocrats, and can play polo, yacht, pilot their airplanes and screw their maids and call girls with freedom. The very notion of good taste evolved with the bourgeoisie of the late eighteenth century. They wished to distinguish themselves, somehow, from their brethren and certainly from the working class, and align themselves with the fellows above their station, the inbred fox hunters and farmers with fancy titles attached to their name.
Likewise, my taste was developed partly in imitation of my betters - my artistic heros, the French and rock stars, among them. In many cases they lead me to discoveries my teachers did not tell me about and to places I wouldn't have discovered on my own.

Unwittingly, I founded part of my identity on what I consumed, thus falling into the clever trap set my marketers, assigning meaning to whether I preferred Armani over Ralph Lauren, or Saville Row versus the Neopolitan cut - these choices being entirely theoretical. Others, less so. Honda or Toyota, and so on -- what idiocy to suppose that a watch brand or a car make confers some imprimatur of achievement, other than the economic ability to spend spare cash on a symbol.

This ridiculousness extended even to weightier matters. Mozart vs. Mahler. Dostoyevsky vs. Tolstoy. Bernini vs. Vermeer, Miller vs. Williams, and so on. After a certain level, they're all magnificent and bizarre, and they all inhabit a summit, Mount Olympus or Parnassus to be old fashioned. Once in that ring, why parse distinctions based on a set of preferences that must be as accidental as blue or brown eyes?

My snobbery was at its peak in my college years; late adolescence being the time, I suppose, when was least certain of Who I Was, and therefore, most desperate to proclaim it.
I took taste so seriously that I, idiotically, did not date women who liked certain kinds of music. Looking back on it, I can see why a perfectly reasonable and otherwise attractive person might not like Throbbing Gristle or The Meat Puppets.

The elemental, fundamental works all are quite beyond any notions of taste, and don't need me any way. The Scottish Border ballads, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky: they reach profound interior spaces as sophisticated and primitive as the cave drawings in Lescaux.

Now when I look over my rows of dvds, the titles on my iPod, the books on my shelves . . . it's a bit boring. I wonder how much of what I think I like is based on a genuine prediliciton, a real encounter with the work, or if it's just an indolent acceptance of some authority whose opinion I've taken on faith.

01 February 2010

After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness

you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don’t you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?